News in Brief

The House has passed legislation to reauthorize school lunch and breakfast programs, and the Senate was expected to give final approval to the bill late last week.

Aides said the bill would require districts to meet nutritional guidelines recently proposed by the U.S. Agriculture Department by the 1996-97 school year, but they may get waivers from state officials until 1998.

The bill would also allow districts to forgo doing detailed nutritional analyses of foods in order to comply with the guidelines, as the U.S.D.A. proposed. Instead, they could use a "food based" system to insure foods in a given meal meet such requirements as a fat-content limit of...